I am signing up with a TV production company who want to make a major TV series of The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez. They envisage “the show will have high production values and will be classy and entertaining” and they want “to develop the idea faithfully to create a big and recognisable brand for television across the world.”

I thought we’d have a change this month, and instead of something book related, celebrate the autumn apple harvest. Indeed, the bumper apple harvest this year has eaten into my writing time with a vengeance. I hate to see waste, so the fruit crops of autumn tend to distract me until they are dealt with.

During every pantomime season, Dick Whittington strides the stage once again in the form of a girl in tights, but there was a great deal more to the real Richard Whittington than a cat and the sound of Bow Bells. Richard Whittington was a famous Mayor of London, a boy born into modest circumstances who rose to become a great public figure, a confidant of kings, and a benefactor whose personal wealth improved the lives of his fellow citizens.

Recently, in a message to me, a reader commented on dramatic structure in the novel, as she saw it in my books – or, rather, she referred to the “plot arc”. She is herself an experienced playwright, but has been struggling with writing her first novel, and this got me thinking about the relationship between the forms of dramatic structure in different types of writing: the novel, the story, the stage play, and the film or TV drama.

My fifth Christoval Alvarez novel, Suffer the Little Children, has just been released as an audiobook, and writing it involved research into the Elizabethan poor.

Researching the problems of the Elizabethan poor, and the various attempts to solve them, proved fascinating, taking me well beyond what I needed for the story. Below are some of the things I discovered. If you’re interested in the audiobook, here are the links:

About a year ago, when I was working on The Bookseller’s Tale, I wrote a piece for The History Girls on medieval pets. A lot of people found it intriguing, so I thought I’d include it here, for your entertainment!